In This Bright Future

by Peter Grainger

  Eventually Quinn said, ‘I think you know exactly what happened to my brother.’

  ‘Ah. This is where it gets a little complicated. What’s the best way to put this? I think that I thought I knew what had happened to Aidan, but since I arrived back in the city, I’ve discovered that I was mistaken. I only knew some of what happened to him. A lot more happened to Aidan that night than I had realised. I also think that you know exactly what I’m talking about.’

  Already the nearest parts of the city, the new western suburbs, were in the shadow of Cave Hill. Looking east, into the blurring light of the horizon between the sea and the sky, another shadow had appeared – the darker, bluer smudge that was the Isle of Man, with its odd air of quirky independence and strange histories.

  Smith said, ‘And I just cannot help thinking now that what happened to your brother and what happened to my friend are linked in some way… But I can see why you’d rather not talk about all this on the phone, Lorcan. I’ve got a couple more people to see, but if you want to meet up, just give me another ring and – oh. He’s gone.’

  He looked at the phone and then listened again as if he could not believe it.

  Catriona said, ‘Just like that? Did he say anything else?’

  ‘Yes, but my Gaelic’s pretty rusty. What’s eff off?’

  ‘I’m not saying that.’

  ‘Go on. I won’t tell Lia.’

  ‘No, I’m not! What did you hear?’

  He frowned before he attempted it – ‘Something like pog mo toyne?’

  She laughed a lot then, before she said, ‘Mr Quinn, the MLA, the great man! He said that to you? But I was listening in – you do have a way of needling a person. I can’t believe he said it, though!’

  ‘And what exactly did he say? I think it’s time you told me, Cati.’

  He leaned forward and pushed her shoulder gently, only playfully, but her face changed and her laughter subsided a little before it bubbled up again.

  ‘Alright. I suppose it’s not so rude as the other thing you wanted me to say.’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘But you still mustn’t tell Lia.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Do you give your word?’

  ‘Yes. And if that doesn’t work, I might have to arrest you. What did he say?’

  ‘Pog mo thoin. The great Mr Quinn told you this – “Kiss me arse”. Don’t you just love it?’

  She was laughing so much again that she lay back on the turf among the harebells and the wild thyme, and Smith thought, at this rate it’s going to be dark before I get her back home.

  It was. They sat in her car at the bus stop, no more than two hundred yards from her house, and waited for what might be the last bus back into Belfast – she was certain that there would be at least one more to come that night. Cati had wanted to drop him back in the city but he had insisted on seeing her home, in the old-fashioned way, and she had not argued too much with him about that. It also gave Smith another opportunity to see if they had been followed but there had been no sign. Friday night, he thought, in the quiet that came when she turned the engine off, the same night on which Brann had disappeared thirty years ago this week. She might have been thinking the same thing as she watched, as they both watched, two young couples arm-in-arm, making their way along the darkening road towards an unseen bar or club; they came right by the car, chattering and smoking, oblivious of the two middle-aged people in the front. Their voices rose and then fell away – talking of who said what to whom, and why, and she’ll regret putting that on Facebook, mark my words.

  ‘So, Switzerland, you say. Where else do you go, you and your wife?’

  It must have been more than two hours, more like three, since he had mentioned that, and now she was carrying on the conversation as if it had only been two or three minutes.

  ‘Oh, we weren’t great travellers. Europe – Greece, the islands, and France. Italy once. We used to have some long weekends in cities as well. Paris. Amsterdam.’

  ‘Weren’t? Why don’t you still go?’ And then, after a pause, ‘Are you divorced now? Most people seem to be these days.’

  His own hesitation was only a brief one; in the light of her own tragedies, somehow it was easier to say than usual.

  ‘No, we didn’t get divorced. Sheila died of breast cancer.’

  ‘Oh my God, I’m sorry. I wasn’t…’

  She had put her hand on his forearm for a moment.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Three years – coming up for four. It’s alright. No need to apologise. You’ve had your own share of that, I know.’

  ‘Even so, it’s a terrible thing. What did she do? Did she work?’

  ‘She was a teacher.’

  Catriona nodded as if that didn’t surprise her at all.

  ‘And all her poor pupils as well...’

  Those words caught Smith unawares. No-one else that he had told since Sheila’s death had grasped that – the get-well cards covered in the optimistic scribbles of youth, the flowers, the visits to their home by her sixth formers, the poems that she had told them to read, preparing them unwittingly for the inevitable end. The two of them sat in silence for a time, a minute, maybe two, before she said, ‘And you had no children?’

  ‘No. It was difficult for her. In the end she used to say that Goodbye Mr Chips thing – that she had had hundreds of children, so what did it matter. But she would have been a very good mother. Just like yourself.’

  When he looked at her, he could see that her eyes were shining.

  She said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘For what? It’s what happens. It’s the cost of living.’

  ‘Maybe. But it seems to be going up all the time. So many sad stories… All that living and we’ve both ended up alone.’

  ‘You’re not. You have your children, your brothers and sisters.’

  ‘And my GP, and my consultant and my home nurse…’, but she was smiling as she said those things now, and the tears that had filled her eyes had not fallen. She looked at her watch.

  ‘The bus will be here any moment. Can I ask you one thing about what you were saying to Lorcan Quinn?’ and Smith nodded in reply. ‘You think Aidan had something to do with what happened to Brann?’

  ‘Yes. But sometimes I put two and two together and make six point three.’

  ‘I don’t see how. He was shot himself the same night in another part of the town altogether. How could he have?’

  ‘I don’t know any of the details. I just have a strong dislike of coincidences. It’s why I want to speak to Quinn.’

  ‘You seriously think that Lorcan Quinn was involved? Jesus, can you imagine the fuss if…’

  Smith knew that he was on the very edge of a minefield here. Cati herself wasn’t daft, and if she passed on any of this to Diarmuid, the consequences might be unwelcome, to say the least.

  ‘No, I didn’t say he was involved. I think he knows something, which isn’t the same thing, necessarily. But he doesn’t seem to want to talk to me, so I’ll have to think of another way.’

  A bus was visible, far down the road, its lights on, making its way slowly towards them.

  ‘I imagine you already have. What will you do tomorrow?’

  ‘I have one or two more names.’

  She was looking directly at him, her eyes moving over his face.

  ‘Tell me you’re not going looking for Tommy Blake.’

  Perhaps she had remembered him in Rourke’s, always with the knife in his hand or on the table in front of him, sometimes opening it and stabbing it into the wooden surface. Smith had not told her who cut his face but she seemed to have a sense of it, if not the certainty.

  ‘No, an encounter with Tommy Blake isn’t number one on my list – assuming he’s still around. No-one has said so but I got the feeling from Martin McCain and Michael O’Dell that he’s lurking out there somewhere.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. The horrible never die young.’

  The bus was just half a mi
nute away now, and Smith made ready to get out of the car and cross the road. He said, ‘I’ll call you if there are any developments tomorrow. And let me know if you hear from Mr Auster again or anyone like him, though I don’t think they’ll try that twice.’

  She said, ‘Well, be careful,’ and then as he stood outside the car with the door still open, she spoke again but he did not catch her words. He leaned back in and asked her what she had said.

  ‘I said that it was a pleasant afternoon and evening. I had some fun. It made a change.’

  ‘And I’d say we should do it again sometime but…’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  There was no-one else at the stop but the driver had pulled up, realising that he had a passenger about to cross the road. Smith looked back as he boarded and gave her a final wave. Then he watched from the back seat as the bus began its journey into the city. He watched until the road in which they been parked was out of sight but he never saw the car move out, never saw Cati drive the last few yards to her home.

  Of course Lorcan Quinn was involved. He had to be.

  It was after twelve o’clock when Smith set foot in the city but he did not take the most direct route back to Mrs Greene’s. Considering that he had climbed half a mountain earlier in the day, the knee was holding up well, and it would do no harm to wander about and be a pain the neck to anyone who might be keeping an eye on him. But he had no sense that he was being followed tonight, and that part of all this was puzzling him. Why watch him some of the time?

  Walking steadily frees the mind – what modern researchers in their universities have discovered, Buddhists in their monasteries have known for a few thousand years. Smith looked at his watch and roughly worked out a route that would give him twenty minutes of steady walking. Gone midnight. Thirty years ago tonight, Brann O’Neill had already been taken off the streets or out of his student’s room. Thirty years ago tonight, Smith was moving like this through the dark streets, alone, the gash on his face hurting now but knowing exactly where he must go to be safe. Thirty years ago tonight, in about an hour’s time, Aidan Quinn would be dead.

  Those were the facts, the certainties – but after them? He thought he knew what came next but had no-one but himself to run it by. It was odd, how one comes to need people for that – Alison Reeve, Murray, Waters or Serena Butler, any one of them would have done at this point. He would say it aloud and then watch them thinking, would listen to and evaluate their response in the light of responses that they had made to him in the past; then his own thoughts would move on in the light of what they had said – using their subtly different echoes of what he had put forward as a means of triangulating for the truth. Over time, after taking a number of such readings, the location of it was almost always revealed.

  He could ring one of them up, of course, and even at this time of the night they would listen to him and ask what they could do to help. The thought touched him for a moment. Not Murray though, best not to interfere with what might be happening there… Not any of them really, at this time of night. Jo Evison? He had heard nothing from her for a fortnight, and he had sent the last text. Perhaps that trail had gone cold. It’s a long way to Munich, and a wide space between an ageing detective trying to put right a mess he didn’t even know he had made many years ago and the exciting worlds of forensic psychology, lecturing, research and some very sophisticated company after dinner.

  Talking of which, he hadn’t eaten since lunchtime, and that had been just a sandwich. There might be a fast-food place open somewhere nearby on a Friday night, and the thought of a kebab had a sudden and rather decadent appeal, after which came the certain knowledge of what such an indulgence would do to his digestion at around three am. Maybe Mrs Greene would have put out in his room another one or two of those little packs of biscuits – something she had obviously initiated once she had begun to seek the international clientele through her advertisements on the internet. It’s what all the posh hotels do… And he could make himself a lovely cup of instant from one of the sachets and enjoy with it the unique flavour of the homogenised, pasteurised and probably irradiated fluid that came in a capsule labelled milk but which undoubtedly had more to do with NASA than a cow. Riches indeed, Smith.

  What was it DCI Miller used to say? It’s a grand life if you don’t weaken.

  Chapter Sixteen

  There had been no biscuits and he had to wonder whether Mrs Greene was taking him for granted now. To make up for that, he ate the full Irish breakfast and drank a succession of cups of coffee, and then she redeemed herself anyway by bringing him a copy of the Belfast Times. Smith glanced over the headlines and then turned to the sports pages at the back – it was a longshot but he had little else to go on this morning.

  Boxing had always been important in the city. As Stuart Reilly, he had kept up his roadwork and fitness, and he had used a gym off the Shankill Road though he had not sparred there; the gym was Catholic and Republican and though he was known to some extent as a regular in Rourke’s, the opportunity to land blows on an Englishman, any Englishman, would have been too tempting for some of the members. He could not recall the name of the gym and it was unlikely to still be there but the thread that he was following now was a thin one indeed. He had to begin somewhere.

  The newspaper mentioned the City Academy in its story about one promising youngster, and in a few moments he had found that on his phone. Calling from here would be a complete waste of time; he needed to see faces in order to work the conversations around to what he really wanted to know, and it was only a short bus-ride away. Boxing clubs tend not to open early but it was a Saturday, so he might be lucky. If not, he would simply wait around – it had been a busy week and he wouldn’t mind a bit of that, as it happened.

  Back in his room, he took a more considered view of the situation. The fact that Lorcan Quinn had not called again might mean a number of things but Smith’s best guess was that he would now wait and see whether he, Smith, had any more moves to make. Finding Jackie Fitzgerald would be very useful but even the act of searching for him should send a message to Quinn – that the detective was serious about discovering what had happened to Brann O’Neill. How good was Quinn’s own intelligence network these days, though? Did it still reach down into the backstreets, the bars and boxing clubs? If it did, Quinn would receive the message loud and clear and soon; if it did not, Smith might be taking unnecessary chances and wasting what little time he had left. He could not stay here indefinitely – for one thing, the widow of Milford Place might begin to get entirely the wrong idea about her English undertaker. He had been given an extra sausage that very morning…

  The City Academy of Boxing had opened promptly at nine am. Smith walked in off the street and stood in the small foyer as he examined the posters on the walls – there are always posters on the walls in boxing clubs. Past glories papered up for some sort of posterity, many old and fading though the place was modern and recently decorated; someone had taken the trouble to remove the posters and then return them to the walls. These are all that remain of those nights of primal conflict, when two men stand face to face, eye to eye, and there is nowhere else to hide. These and the scars, of course, and the names in record books, and the tarnished cups in cabinets and the belts gathering dust in forgotten cupboards.

  Two teenaged girls in track suits walked in behind him, each carrying a sports bag. They were both blonde, both pretty, and one said a polite good morning as they passed by and saw him looking at them. He watched them go through a double door, and then watched the doors swing to and fro, a little less each time until they were still. The tough, unsmiling faces of Buster McGuin and Wild Boy Williams and a dozen others looked down like painted saints upon Smith, and Smith looked at the doors for a few seconds more before he moved towards them.

  In front of him was the main ring, empty at present, and off through another doorway to the left was a gym and training area. The two girls must have gone that way. Other doors led into other rooms beyon
d and to the right of the ring. It was all well-lit and clean – money had been spent and he could imagine that it was not difficult to raise cash to keep the young people off the streets of the city. Especially the young people who would come and be good at this. He had never forgotten the type since he first entered the ring as a new Army recruit. Quick and naturally skilful without ever having suspected it in himself, he was nevertheless at first simply bowled over by the aggression, the sheer, wildly-swinging anger present in some of the other men. His own upbringing hadn’t always been easy but what had happened to some of these to produce such apparent hatred of perfect strangers? He had almost backed away from it until the major in charge, Major Agassiz, had said to him “Use their anger against them. The smart bastard wins in the end, most of the time.”

  A young man in shorts and a vest left the small group who were strapping up beyond the ring and came towards him. Smith wondered what this might look like – a middle-aged bloke hanging around a gym amid all these fit youngsters.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Possibly. I’m a bit of fan, doing some research. I’m staying in the city for a few days and thought I’d look up some of the old-time fighters, just to see want happened to them.’

  ‘Research? Are you writing about them?’

  The prospect seemed to please the young man, and so Smith went along with it.

  ‘That’s a possibility. I was hoping to track down Wally Fitzgerald if he’s still alive. He fought for the Ulster title forty odd years ago now – light heavyweight.’

  The vest was embroidered with the words ‘Chief Coach’ and he looked as if he might be; the muscles in the arm were tight but not bulky, and below the left eyebrow was a single scar. The face was narrow and hard-boned, and the skin was taut – he hadn’t been hit there too often.

  ‘Wally Fitzgerald? The name rings a bell, that’s all. I don’t think he fought from here.’

  ‘OK, not a problem. I’ll try some other clubs. Is there still one out on the Shankill Road, do you know?’